


Look After You

by maplemood



Category: The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Extra Treat, Families of Choice, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Wisdom Teeth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-03
Updated: 2019-02-03
Packaged: 2019-10-21 09:06:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17639843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maplemood/pseuds/maplemood
Summary: Leo knows only two people who got their wisdom teeth out before her, and Mom said no way did it hurt as much as everyone tells you it will, and Dad said no, it really didn’t, but, uh, he wasn’t chewing anything harder than mashed potatoes for almost three weeks afterward.





	Look After You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sholio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/gifts).



> Hey! I deliberately kept the timeline of this a little hazy, so it can take place either between seasons 1 & 2 or possibly at some point after season 2. I hope you enjoy it!

Leo knows only two people who got their wisdom teeth out before her, and Mom said no way did it hurt as much as everyone tells you it will, and Dad said no, it really didn’t, but, uh, he wasn’t chewing anything harder than mashed potatoes for almost three weeks afterward. Which is as good as admitting that both Dad and Mom are lying through their teeth because they don’t want Leo to freak out about it, and maybe they’ve forgotten that she’s already been through so much worse. By the time Dr. Gutiérrez puts her under, Leo’s just hoping for something in between “not painful at all” and “gumming jell-o for weeks to come.” 

She wakes up with a mouth packed full of gauze—gauze that already tastes like blood—and when Mom and a nurse try to help her out of the cranked-up chair Leo hears herself say, “Guys! I’m fine!” two seconds before she almost falls flat on her face. 

“Okay, tough girl.” Mom’s laughing, but she’s nice enough to pretend she isn’t. Grabbing Leo under the arms, she whispers, “Let’s get you home, huh?”

Dad and Zach are on a camping trip with the rest of the synagogue’s Boy Scout troop—ever since Dad came back Zach’s been obsessed with merit badges and pinewood derbies—so Leo and Mom are alone, with the house to themselves. The plan was to make it a girls’ night,  _ Titanic _ on the TV, rosé for Mom, orange juice for Leo (she’s not supposed to drink soda for at least four days). All that falls apart after Mom’s boss calls. 

“Julie’s kids are sick.”

“Did you tell her  _ I’m _ sick?” Leo’s so woozy, she probably couldn’t focus on Kate Winslet and other Leo anyway, and every word out of her mouth feels bulky and slobbery, but that doesn’t mean she wants Mom gone. They used to spend practically all their time together; they used to be a team. Now Dad’s back, and everything’s different.

_ Better. _

Different.

“I know. I know, I know.” Mom sounds more upset than she does. “There’s no one else to cover.”

“No one?”

“Sweetheart, let me—okay.” Sighing, Mom grabs her phone again. “Tell you what. Let me—”

“Tell me what?” Leo tries to sit up. She’s sunk in the middle of their super-saggy couch, her skull throbbing like it’s been filled with hot rocks. Shame’s also boiling up, hot, in her belly. Mom’s been working so hard, trying to hard. Dad has, too, but things aren’t like they were before. Nobody’s exactly jumping to hire a former fugitive. So much is still on Mom’s shoulders, and Leo, Leo’s supposed to be Mom’s rock, she isn’t supposed to make things harder for her…. “Tell me what?” she repeats, all the same. 

Mom pushes her down with one hand. “I’m taking care of it,” she says, phone clamped between her ear and shoulder as she pulls the fuzzy afghan up to Leo’s neck. “How about you go to sleep, huh? You look wiped out.”

She doesn’t plan on it, and doesn’t feel tired so much as achy all over, but the next thing Leo knows her eyelids are peeling up like old, gummy tape, there’s drool everywhere, and Mom’s saying, “—two, maybe three ibuprofen. She gets more of that in two hours.”

And then a voice Leo figured she might never hear again rumbles, “Nothing too hot, no straws, no soda. Ibuprofen’s in the medicine cabinet. Got it.”

This time she sits up, so fast her head swims. “Pete?” No, wait, no— “Frank?”

Wow. There he is. As big as she remembers, with the buzzcut she remembers, in the black jacket she remembers. If she wanted to, Leo could pretend it’s been only a few weeks, a month at most, since she last saw him. Not—you know. Her gums twinge. “What’re you doing here?”

It comes out a little (okay, a lot) sharper than she meant it to. All he says is, “Hey, Rocky.”

Mom, with her hair already up and her purse over her shoulder, smiles. Leo winces. “They’re that bad?”

“Nah.” Frank taps his own cheek. “Little bit swollen. That’s all.”

Leo blinks. Her eyes feel crusted over, still gummy. She lifts her hand to rub them, then drops it.  She looks pathetic enough. “I guess since you’re here we don’t have to watch  _ Titanic. _ What about _ Life of Pi? _ You didn’t watch it without me, did you?”

“No ma’am.”

She wants to smile to make up for snapping at him, except then all Frank’s going to get is an eyeful of drool and bloody gauze. Instead, she scoots herself to one end of the couch. Her head swims sloshes. “Come on,” Leo says. “Sit down.”

Mom comes over first, kissing the top of Leo’s head so lightly, it doesn’t hurt at all. “I’m sorry, kiddo,” she murmurs. 

“It’s okay.” Really, it is. 

“I’ll be back tonight.” Mom sounds so strained that Leo fumbles for her hand. Once she finds it, she squeezes it as hard as she can. 

“I mean it, Mom. They need you at work.” Besides, she kind of thought it would take another kidnapping, or another death, to bring Frank back to their door. 

***

_ Life of Pi _ is about a million times longer than Leo remembers. Not even halfway through she zones out, watching the screen flicker in front of her like an aquarium full of tropical fish, sleek and bright and hypnotizing. Every few minutes she surfaces long enough to look over at Frank, who’s sitting at the other end of the couch. Bent forward, his right hand cupped over his left fist, he worries his knuckles with the other thumb. 

_ That was it,  _ Leo thinks.  _ That was your tic. I remember. _ She says, “You know, the tiger’s totally CGI.”

“Yeah?” They haven’t turned on the lights yet, and what’s coming through the windows is too dim for her to get a good read on his expression. “I’d hope so.”

“Ha,” she says, “ha.” Then Leo grimaces. 

Frank unclasps his hands and checks his watch. “You ready for your pills?”

He gets her a glass of water and the two ibuprofen while Leo shuffles to the bathroom to change her gauze. She has to pick it all out before she swallows the pills, and swallowing’s much more complicated than it used to be—it’s too painful, or her mouth’s maybe too numb, and all the water comes dribbling back out, a huge reddish splotch down the front of her shirt. “Crap!”

“Hey.”

“Shit!” That dislodges a long, dribbly rope of bloody spit. Leo tries to suck it back down without any luck. “Shit!” she repeats, her eyes stinging. Of course Frank had to come back when she’s at her absolute  _ lowest, _ dribbling all over the place—and if she starts crying, she’ll drool more—

“Hey,” Frank says, and his voice isn’t unkind, but it’s sharp enough to pull Leo up short, drag her eyes up to his. A drill-sergeant type of voice, the voice Mom uses when Leo’s bugging Zach or Zach’s bugging Leo. “Stop it.” He grabs a napkin. “Get yourself cleaned up. We’ll try this again, okay?”

Part of Leo wants to point out that  _ he’s _ not trying anything, but she mops off her face while Frank refills the glass and tips two more pills onto his palm. He hands those to her first. 

Leo shakes her head. “They’re not gonna go down,” she says, knowing she sounds pissy, but her jaw feels like it’s been filled with boiling lead, and somehow numb at the same time—whatever’s going in is coming right back out. 

“Take it easy,” Frank says, his voice not as sharp, but there’s a warning in it, still. “Tip those pills to the back of your throat before you swallow. It’ll help.”

On the second try she swallows the water, but not the pills. On the third, they finally do scrape down, and Leo gives Frank a thumbs up, even though she still feels like crap. 

He nods. “Attagirl.”

After changing her shirt and repacking her mouth, Leo crawls back onto the couch. The movie’s paused. Frank’s here, not even three feet away from her, and Leo—the part of Leo, anyway, that’s been missing him for what feels like forever, that’s been having actual dreams about him, dreams where Dad brings him home and he stays in their spare bedroom for as long as he needs, eating dinner with them every night, dropping Zach and her off at school when Mom and Dad can’t, like any of that could ever happen—wants to scoot even closer and link her arm through his, or rest her aching head against Frank’s shoulder. Tell him, _ Sorry I was being a brat. Sorry I’m such a mess.  _

Nope. Too soon, too much. Way too much. Instead, Leo says, “This wouldn’t’ve happened if my wisdom teeth didn’t come in so crazy fast. Most people don’t get them out until they’re in college. At least.”

“That right, Rocky?”

“That’s right.”

“Must be all your wisdom,” Frank says, and he grins at her.

Leo grins back. What the heck, he’s already seen her drool. “Or I’m just an anomaly.”

***

She thinks about asking him where he’s been, but Leo doesn’t think Frank will answer. No—she knows he won’t. The same way he won’t say why he came now, of all times, and where he’ll go after this, and what he’ll do. 

The thing is, too, that Leo shouldn’t want to know all those things. But she does. She wants so much it hurts. It hurts even more, and even deeper, than what she’s got going on right now; it hurts the way thinking about Dad always did, when they still thought he was dead. Whether it takes three weeks or three months, this pain will go away. Pretty soon she’ll be able to bite into an apple or slurp down hot cocoa without feeling like her jaw’s pulling apart. 

Back when he was coming around to fix everything and they thought nothing of it, Leo would sometimes sneak just far enough down the hallway to listen in on Mom and Frank’s (Pete’s) conversations, if they were talking in the kitchen. If they were talking in the living room, she’d sit at the top of the stairs, knees pulled up to her chest, arms crossed around them. Zach would be in his room with the door cracked, like that would fool Leo into thinking he wasn’t listening, too. So many of Mom and Frank’s conversations ended up being about Zach and Leo. It was kind of gratifying, and also really sad.

“Give them time,” she remembers him saying. “Kids are resilient, you know? Give them time and they’ll bounce back.”

It was like this tiny, warm seed he planted. Knowing that an adult who wasn’t related to her and didn’t really know her, who didn’t need to say nice things about Zach and Leo and pretend like there were doing fine (when Zach couldn’t stand Leo anymore and she couldn’t stand him, when she had no friends left but her mom, and nothing better to do than hang around the house all day, reading books, trying to fix things, and half the time breaking them even more), knowing that Pete, who looked like he meant business, and who could fix anything, knowing that this guy, of all people, thought they were  _ resilient _ , that they’d be okay...Leo believed him. She wouldn’t have believed anyone else if they’d said that, not even Mom. 

Another time, when she was standing on tiptoe in the hall, Mom laughed a little, the kind of laugh they hadn’t heard since Dad left, and called, “Leo, honey? You can come out now. Come on.”

Leo’s insides still curdle when she thinks about the way she scuttled in, her face burning. Frank was standing by the counter, his hands in his pockets, his head bent a little so he could look Mom in the eyes, except now he was looking at Leo. 

“Hey, kid.”

“Hey,” she mumbled. Then, “Sorry.”

He shook his head. “You want to know what’s being said about you, who’s saying it. That’s smart. Come here.”

He had a bag of candy for them, Old-Fashioned Sassafras, stained-glass orange nuggets powdered with sugar. The kind of candy adults liked because it reminded them of the kinds of candies their grandparents used to give them, not because it necessarily tasted all that good. 

Leo said, “Thanks.”

“Share it with your brother,” Frank said. “He ain’t gonna take any from me.”

Zach didn’t take any from her, either, so Leo ate the entire bag by herself. The candies were better than she thought they’d be. Liquoricey.

She’s thinking about the candies now, watching Frank make his way around their kitchen. He heats up a can of Campbell’s for himself and fills a bowl with applesauce for Leo. Then he sprinkles cinnamon in the applesauce—Leo isn’t crazy about cinnamon, but she doesn’t say anything. Probably that’s how he made it for his kids. She thinks about other things Frank might have made, hot dogs, scrambled eggs, mac and cheese. What was his cooking like? What was he like?

Leo’s never going to know. Not what Frank was like before, and not even completely what he’s like now, after—because when Frank looks at them, her and Zach and Mom and Dad, he doesn’t see them. He sees the family he doesn’t have anymore, a family he needs to protect. 

Her jaw throbs. She tastes more blood welling up in her mouth. “Frank?”

He turns his head, looks back to her. “Sweetheart?”

She’s packed in so much gauze that her mouth feels stretched tight, too full for words. “I’m glad you’re here,” Leo says. 

***

“Talk to me. I don’t want to go to sleep.” She keeps doing it, though. All the ibuprofen doesn’t help, and neither does a stomach full of applesauce. But this could be it, the last time she sees Frank for a whole slew of months, or years. The last time she sees him at all. “Talk to me,” Leo says. 

“You should get some sleep, kid.”

“I told you,” she snaps, and he gives her this look, like, _ You are toeing a very fine line here, _ but Leo pushes on. “I don’t want to sleep. I want you to talk to me.”

“And tell you what? Huh?”

Leo glares at Frank, at the stony face she recognizes from when he used to look at Zach when Zach was being a douche, but she can be a douche, too, she’s had four teeth yanked right out of her head and she hasn’t seen Frank in ages, and she’s not a kid, not after everything that’s happened and all the time she’s waited. “Anything,” she says. 

Frank scoffs. He shakes his head and looks away from her. “You don’t want that.”

“I do.”  _ I want to know. _

“You don’t,” Frank growls, though in that second it’s not his voice, and it’s The Punisher who glares at Leo out of Frank’s dark eyes. “I’m not saying so again.”

“Then don’t.”

He laughs, a little. It’s not friendly. “Better quit while you’re ahead.” 

It’s no use, Leo realizes, with a furious stab of disappointment that she knows he sees flash all across her face. Frank won’t break. He never does. She won’t lose him trying. 

Also, her jaw’s beginning to ache, really ache, again. 

“Fine,” Leo says. “You win.” She slumps back into the cushions and curls her fingers into the afghan. “But I still don’t want to go to sleep.”

“Jesus Christ,” Frank mutters. There’s a long, tense pause, and then he says, “How about a book, all right? I read you a book, would that help you go to sleep?”

Leo remembers being six, five, tucked into bed with Mom or Dad’s voice floating over her. Warm light, the crinkle of turning pages. “Okay,” she says. She thinks for a minute. “ _ To Kill a Mockingbird _ ’s on my desk, in my bedroom. That’s for school. I guess you could read me that.”

“So you’ve got me doing your homework now,” he grumbles, but Frank gets up, and goes to get the book, and sits down beside her to read about Scout and Jem and Atticus, and Leo watches him, his big hands clenched to the flimsy paperback cover, his thick fingers turning the newsprint-thin pages, watches Frank until her eyes fuse shut.

***

“Frank?” Her head pounds. So does her jaw. Her mouth tastes like something died in it. The lights are off, but the TV’s flickering, the volume so low it’s practically on mute. Some random news station. Something about a shooting. Gang-related. Brighton Beach. 

It shoots from the pit of Leo’s gut and along her jaw like fire: He left, he’s gone, he’s not coming back. She bolts up, black dots dancing in her eyes, so panicked that it takes her more than a minute to see that he’s still here, still parked on the other end of the couch, stiff, his shoulders hunched and his fist clasped in his other hand. This faceless black bulk in the dark, and when Leo says his name, even softer this time, she hears the uncertainty in her own voice. “Frank?”

He doesn’t answer. 

Later, she won’t be totally sure how she knew that this was what she was supposed to do—now, Leo just  _ does. _ Making her way to his end of the couch feels like it takes a thousand miles and a million years, with all the molten-hot rocks grinding over each other in her skull, and when she gets there Leo reaches for his arm. She doesn’t pat it. She grabs onto it, hard. “Frank,” she says, all blood and drool and gauze scratching her cheeks dry. “You’re here. Right here. You’re okay. It’s okay.”

And he turns. Away from the TV. To her. He comes back. 

“It’s okay,” Leo says. “You’re good.” Maybe she’s lying. Maybe she isn’t. It doesn’t matter, not right this second. 

Frank clears his throat. Light from the TV casts his face gray, the stubble of his hair, too. It shadows his eyes; Leo can’t see them. Can’t see what he’s seeing in her. “Okay, sweetheart,” he says. “Okay.”

“You’re good?”

“I’m good.” He reaches across himself with his free arm, grabs hold of her arm like she grabbed hold of his. They hold each other for a while, Frank’s thumb rubbing circles over Leo’s shoulder. Then he asks, “How’s your jaw?”

Leo swallows experimentally. “Not so bad.”

“Yeah?”

“I mean, like, no worse than normal. I don’t think I can take any more pills yet.”

“Uh-huh. Give it another hour.” He’s so careful not to touch the side of her swollen face, even by accident. “You need an extra blanket?” Frank asks. 

“I’m not cold,” Leo says. 

“Could’ve fooled me,” he says, dry. “Kid, you’re shaking like a leaf.”

“No,” says Leo. “I’m not.”

He lets go of her shoulder and circles one of her wrists with his fingers. “Look.”

Leo looks. She doesn’t feel it, not really, but she’s shivering, and shivering so hard that Frank’s arm, the one she’s still hanging on to, is shaking, too. She lets go, and her arms sort of automatically wrap around her middle. Her teeth click together. “There’s extras in Mom’s closet,” she mutters. 

While Frank’s gone she switches the channel to a nature documentary. He comes back lugging one of the big winter quilts, and before Leo can reach out to take it Frank drapes it over her, his big, callused fingers tucking in the edges just like Mom would. Leo looks up at him. She wonders if she should say anything, because she’s sure her breath smells awful—it hurts too much to brush her teeth—but she can’t  _ not _ say anything, so. “Hey, Frank?”

He grunts: _ I heard you.  _

“Wake me up before you leave. We’ve got to say goodbye. We have to.”

He looks down at her. Leo still can’t quite get a fix on what’s in his eyes; it’s dark and her head aches and she’s so, so tired….they’re always going to think she’s just a kid, Frank, and Mom, and Dad. No matter what she’s been through, they’re always going to try to protect her. They won’t want to open up. That’s just how it is. 

He’s next to her, he’s here, he’s with her. “I’m right here,” Frank says, and Leo thinks,  _ Yeah, for, like, another hour. _

But that has to be enough. And she does know him, sort of, despite Frank’s best efforts. She knows him enough to help. Which means she knows a lot, or at least that she knows enough. Blood and drool and all, mess and all, Leo  _ knows.  _

“Wake me up,” she says, and closes her eyes.  


End file.
